I know the owner of the company's ebay member name and I've realized an interesting correlation between his bidding and the pressure he likes to put on his sales staff. Over the last few years he's made a number of large purchases involving vehicles, antiques, and other expensive "useless" junk. Whenever he starts ratcheting up his sales demands it means he's found something he wants. Whenever he gets overly concerned about what is closing today/tomorrow he's made a purchase. He's an ebay addict so there's usually a purchase of some kind every few days and I check his bid history at least twice a week for my amusement. My friend use to have a fake myspace back when myspace first came out for picking up chicks on the side. He didn't know that anyone knew about it so we use to mess with him mercilessly from fake accounts of our own. Focus: You be spyin? If so, who? how? Alt focus: Have you been spied on? What for? What happened?
I've always found it an interesting quirk of eBay that, by knowing someone's username, you can see their purchase history for quite a while. Sometimes this can be fun and interesting, but other times it is just stuff you do not want to know. A roommate of mine had (I guess 'has') a fantastically funny eBay username that makes him sound like some giant warehouse-based company but it's really just him. He had bought a few things that were no big deal, but then I saw some...intimate items for his girlfriend at the time. Whoops. I don't spy on people by getting their passwords and reading their email or anything like that. An ex-girlfriend of mine read everybody's email that she knew regularly (without their knowledge), except mine because I would never give her my password under any circumstances. She was always angling for it, but I never caved and she eventually got tired of wheedling. One time, however, it was a moral imperative to find somebody. A friend of mine was a TA for a class, and some student in his class (he didn't know who) was spoofing emails to the class mailing list, impersonating him. The spoofer was a dumbass, it wasn't like my friend the TA wasn't going to find out that this was going on. Anyway he asked me to look at the emails and see if I could find out who it was. The emails had been sent from a shared public system, and so that left us some clues to go on. I enlisted a little additional help and a crowd soon gathered in my office while the hunt was on. While there's a crowd of 10 people all hacking in my office together, a professor walks by and sees the commotion. "Hey...what's up in here?" "We're going after somebody who did something bad." "I don't want to know about this, do I?" "Nope." He left. With a bit of cleverness and a little luck, we figured out who it was. Later on, the professor who walked by asked me "hey, did you catch the guy you were looking for?" "You want to see pictures of him making out with his girlfriend?" (We had actually found these in a place that he had hidden, but not protected, them). Professor's response: "Remind me never to screw with you guys."
I once opened the door to my girlfriend's roommate's / best friend's room and saw her boobs. She didn't notice.
I used to drunk-stalk my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend. I have never met this girl, but she has pictures of him as her date for a wedding, so I was flipping through her Facebook just to see him. Then there was a 3-month period of time where my friends and I would be a few drinks in and just started going through her profile history. I had to stop when my boyfriend walked in on me.
Spying is one of the things that I do for clients, such as online video games, online poker sites, online banking, etc. This spying can be something like figuring out if someone has hacked a game client, up to collusion detection in online poker rooms (detecting group play). The actual spying can be somewhat interesting, in that you have to do it in a way that you hope 99% of hackers won't be able to detect. That means you have to pretty well know the existing attack vectors, and then try and come up with a way that doesn't look like you're doing what you are doing. A lot of that comes down to doing the long-play analysis, where you just sneak in the occasional bit of info, and then analyze the collection at a later date. A lot of it also comes down to cross-referencing things from different areas, like game play reward vs the revenue stream, analyzing and measuring various metrics within a particular game or monitoring session, and then determining when a metric is noticeable enough to follow up on. When you're dealing with millions of players and hundreds of millions of data points, that is no small feat, and can be quite challenging. Just getting real-time metrics on current game-play is a huge challenge. Conceiving and developing these tools, as well as the real-time metric gathering systems that support them, and the near-real-time analysis engines can be very challenging, to say the least. The REALLY fun times are when a bug in the code throws in data that registers as a potential hack. Nothing wrong happened, and it's totally random when it does happen. You think Sudoku is hard? Ha!
Alternative Focus My freshman year of college, I went out to a party, met a girl I thought was kind of cute, went back to her dorm and hung out with her and some of her friends for a while,and then called it a night without really talking to her again after that. Little did I know of the craziness I had just unleashed. A year later, I still live on campus but I switched dorm buildings because of a change in major. As it turned out, not only did I move into the same building as the girl I just mentioned, I had inadvertently moved right next door to her. At first, I thought nothing of this coincidence. A couple weeks later, I find out from her roommate that she had been spreading rumors that I was a stalker. Her claim wasn't just based on my moving next door to her, it was based on an entire year of observing me and putting my actions under the most absurd contexts. For example, after we met I realized that she was in my zoology lecture and, in the only instance that I talked to her after we hung out, came up to her after class and asked her if she had the notes from a day I hadn't been there. As perceived by crazy girl. She hadn't noticed that I was in the same class untill after we met either. So rather than figure, like a normal person, that she just hadn't noticed me before in a lecture hall of 200 people, she concluded that there was no way I had actually been registered in that class but had just been going to keep tabs on her. She also claimed that I had started going out with some "emo" girl just to make her jealous, which is funny because I dated that "emo" girl for nine months. Aside from that, she claimed that I would randomly show up to places because I knew that she would be there. She even went as far as to say that I was in love with her. The irony of the situation is striking. Here's this girl who can't help but notice me and twist all of my actions into a strange fantasy she constructed of me as a stalker in love with her when in actuality I was almost completely oblivious to her. My take on the situation is that she wanted to be desired so badly that she subconsciously made her self believe that she was being pursued by a stalker.
I have had a fake facebook account with no friends on it for the past 3 years now. I use it for both creepy and "reality-check" purposes. I said this in the thread "The female perspective" that I mentioned jerking off to pictures of females. It has a bit of a not so creepy side to it though: This lets me be aware to stop me from doing stupid shit like posting cartoon images thinking it's going to help a "cause", hear stuff going on in pop culture(It's just easier to eavesdrop rather than read the news or even watch TV), learn some new slang, and recognizing faces with names after I meet them. I do this because I'm uncomfortable being on facebook(you are expected to have pictures up, log in regularly, list your relationship status, some people may ask you uneasy questions you'd rather not answer etc) yet want to make reap benefits of it. I think of it as probably my only chance at being an invisible. I'm gonna get red dotted to hell for this but that isn't going to stop me from continuing to be a creep.
One of my ex's broke up with me and then went totally batshit crazy. All of my passwords used to be variations of the same thing, and at one time I had given her the password to my desktop. She used that information and guessed the password to my facebook account (erased pictures and made me gay....oooooohhhh.) and my hotmail account. I quickly changed all my passwords to something she would never guess. Later she used personal information (checking account and routing number) that I had forgotten on her computer from doing taxes to somehow order me $300 worth of homosexual periodicals. I saw the charge to my checking account before the stuff even shipped and cancelled it. Oh crazy chicks, sometimes you make me laugh. And then I reported it to the FTC and the local PD.
I freaked a girl out tonight. Met her on Saturday, things went well and we chilled for a while back at her place. Talked on the phone tonight and we were horsing around and the subject of last names came up. I told her I knew hers. She called bullshit, so I told her and she went dead silent. I then let her off the hook by saying that she'd had some mail in plain sight with her name on it. I'm pretty sure in those five seconds of silence she wet herself.
I have managed to get the passwords to a few email accounts that have been particularly helpful to my academic career. The most fun with "hacking" lately is to use Fire Sheep on the unsecured wireless network on campus. Fucking around with the Facebook profiles of people who so clearly consider it the backbone of their life amuses me. Write on their ex's wall, change their name, change their status, etc. Just little things to fuck with them. My apologies to Mrs. Cockburn. We may have gone overboard with you.
I'm an insomniac, so I don't know how many other people know this, but the world is a really boring place at 4am. Therefore, I tend to spend an alarming amount of time on Facebook late at night. I'm not technologically savvy enough to hack into anyone's profiles or anything, but I half-joked recently that thanks to fifteen years of schooling where I mainly studied literature, I am now freakishly good at "reading" profiles and figuring out everything about people's lives, even things that they don't know themselves. (As in, I once had to be the one to tell a guy a girl actually liked him and wasn't just in it for a casual relationship because of cues I'd gotten from his profile.) Honestly, though, I've talked about this with my friends, and I think that's it's just a common skill that (at least) girls have developed these days. Almost everyone I know does this, so I don't feel so weird. I also used to Google this whole list of people (that was mostly my family that I don't see anymore, or have died) every couple of months, but I haven't for a year because I was finding out too many things that I didn't want to know and once freaked myself out into thinking that my mom had had me with another man (which is a long story that I know now isn't true so I won't get into it).
This is precisely why I don't have a Facebook or Myspace, so weirdos don't go browsing through my shit and stalking me.
Me too and it pisses me off when some friend says "Hey I posted that pic of us on my page! I had too, it's so cute!" Hey dipshit you know exactly why I don't have any of that stupid shit. When my ex finds me and shanks me you get to live with it.
Alt. Focus: I dated a girl for quite a while (a couple years) who was really all wrong for me but we had a good relationship, she was nice and pretty normal, and when the time came that we we should move on, we did with no more tears than you'd expect from dating someone for a couple years. I worked in the same building that she did, and it pretty suddenly went from a couple friendly emails from her, "let's be friends" etc., to the cold shoulder. Totally ignoring my existence. Okay, fine, it's not like I had to interact with her. A bit more than a year later, I moved about 800 miles away to an apartment. The year after that, I bought a house and moved into that with my girlfriend. My girlfriend, through the network of previous coworkers and the miracle of the Internet, ends up finding out that the ex moved to the same state I had moved to. Actually, to the same city. More specifically, to the same apartment complex. In particular, the apartment complex rented her the apartment I had just vacated. Woah. I kept waiting for the phone to ring but she never contacted me, I never saw her, and she eventually moved to another state.
One of my ex's used to have her friends come ask me really stupidly obvious questions that were clearly coming from her. Questions such as: 1. "Im really sorry you and [name redacted] broke up, are you seeing anyone else yet?" 2. "Are you still upset from the break up?" 3. "I PROMISE I wont tell her, but do you still care about her?" This was not in middle school or even high school, but when I was in college. One of the reasons I broke up with her was her immaturity, can ya believe it?
Since I live in MN, this resource is invaluable: http://pa.courts.state.mn.us/default.aspx I've found some pretty crazy court cases on people I know (e.g. ex-girlfriend's family). It's a good buffer to know what you're getting yourself into beforehand.
Well there is plenty of other reasons too. Another is because motherfuckers are too lazy to pickup the damned phone and call someone or actually hang out. Instead they spend it all day posting about shit no one cares about. Im fascinated about the people who spy on here. Why do you do it? Is there anything specific that would motivate you to do it?
I find this interesting too, and have decided that people don't like to be around their friends and yet need their constant approval, thus the phenom of Facebooking and other "networking" sites. Fuck, it's a job. Spying is human nature. It usually suggests that you have an strategic advantage over your enemy. Strangers are kind of enemies, potentially. I'm stoned, carry on.